This article explores the timeline and map of African independence, from the late 19th century to the present day, revealing how the continent was carved up and subsequently decolonized. For centuries, African peoples and empires had been involved in trade and diplomatic relations with Europeans.
The most profound changes occurred between 1880 and 1895. In 1884-85, the Berlin Conference was called to establish the ground rules amongst Europeans claiming territory on the African continent. No African sovereigns or representatives were invited to attend.
The boundaries drawn by Europeans in the late 19th century remain, to a large extent, the boundaries of Africa's independent nations today. When the Organization of African Unity (OAU) first convened in May of 1961, it was decided to leave the current national borders as they were in order to avoid unnecessary turmoil. Most of the continents 53 sovereign nations gained their independence in the 1960s, while others struggled through the 1970s, the 1980s and even into the 1990s before gaining national independence. The Western Sahara is a region that as late as 2007 had not yet received international recognition as an independent, self-governing, nation-state.
The series of maps below illustrates the territorial changes in Africa from the early colonial rivalries before the Berlin Conference (1885) to the decolonization era after the late 1950s.
The first map represents the early colonial rivalries just before the Berlin Conference (1885), during which the European powers shared the continent.
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The second map shows the territorial result of this on the eve of World War II, a war which was partly due to the intensification of these imperial rivalries.
The third map illustrates the end of the process with the more or less violent decolonization that has taken place since the late 1950s, drawing the map of present-day African states.
The decolonisation of Africa was a series of political developments in Africa that spanned from the mid-1950s to 1975, during the Cold War. Colonial governments gave way to sovereign states in a process often marred by violence, political turmoil, widespread unrest, and organised revolts.
The Scramble for Africa between 1870 and 1914 was a significant period of European imperialism in Africa that ended with almost all of Africa, and its natural resources, claimed as colonies by European powers, who raced to secure as much land as possible while avoiding conflict amongst themselves. Almost all the precolonial states of Africa lost their sovereignty.
In the early 20th century, nationalism gained ground globally. Following the end of World War I, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires according to the principles espoused in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Though many anti-colonial intellectuals saw the potential of Wilsonianism to advance their aims, Wilson had no intention of applying the principle of self-determination outside the lands of the defeated Central Powers. The independence demands of Egyptian and Tunisian leaders, which would have compromised the interests of the victorious Allies, were not entertained.
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Many Africans fought in both World War I and World War II. In World War I, African labor was essential on the Western Front, and African soldiers fought in the Sinai and Palestine campaign. Many Africans were not allowed to bear arms or serve on an equal basis with whites. Approximately one million sub-Saharan Africans served in European armies in some capacity.
In the 1930s, colonial powers cultivated, sometimes inadvertently, a small elite of local African leaders educated in Western universities, where they became familiar with ideas such as self-determination.
Historian James Meriweather argues that American policy towards Africa was characterized by a middle road approach, which supported African independence but also reassured European colonial powers that their holdings would remain intact. Washington wanted the right type of African groups to lead newly independent states, in other words not communist and not especially democratic.
Meriweather argues that nongovernmental organizations influenced American policy towards Africa. They pressured state governments and private institutions to disinvest from African nations not ruled by the majority population.
On 6 March 1957, Ghana (formerly the Gold Coast) became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain its independence from European colonisation. Starting with the 1945 Pan-African Congress, the Gold Coast's (modern-day Ghana's) independence leader Kwame Nkrumah made his focus clear. In the conference's declaration, he wrote, "We believe in the rights of all peoples to govern themselves. We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny.
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In 1948, three Ghanaian veterans were killed by the colonial police on a protest march. Riots broke out in Accra and though Nkrumah and other Ghanaian leaders were temporarily imprisoned, the event became a catalyst for the independence movement. In February 1951, the CPP gained political power by winning 34 of 38 elected seats, including one for Nkrumah who was imprisoned at the time. The British government revised the Gold Coast Constitution to give Ghanaians a majority in the legislature in 1951.
Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave the famous "Wind of Change" speech in South Africa, in February 1960, where he spoke to the country's Parliament of "the wind of change blowing through this continent." Macmillan urgently wanted to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria. Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968.
British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was not a peaceful process. Kenyan independence was preceded by the eight-year Mau Mau Uprising.
Belgium controlled several territories and concessions during the colonial era, principally the Belgian Congo (modern DRC) from 1908 to 1960 and Ruanda-Urundi (modern Rwanda and Burundi) from 1922 to 1962. Roughly 98% of Belgium's overseas territory was just one colony, about 76 times larger than Belgium itself, known as the Belgian Congo.
The colony was founded in 1908 following the transfer of sovereignty from the Congo Free State, which was the personal property of Belgium's king, Leopold II. The violence used by Free State officials against indigenous Congolese and the ruthless system of economic extraction had led to intense diplomatic pressure on Belgium to take official control of the country. Belgian rule in the Congo was based on the "colonial trinity" (trinité coloniale) of state, missionary and private company interests.
During the 1940s and 1950s, the Congo experienced extensive urbanization and the administration aimed to make it into a "model colony". Of Belgium's other colonies, the most significant was Ruanda-Urundi, a portion of German East Africa, which was given to Belgium as a League of Nations Mandate, when Germany lost all of its colonies at the end of World War I.
The French colonial empire began to fall during World War II when the Vichy France regime controlled the Empire. One after another, most of the colonies were occupied by foreign powers with Japan in Indochina, Britain in Syria, Lebanon, and Madagascar, the United States and Britain in Morocco and Algeria, and Germany and Italy in Tunisia.
Control was gradually reestablished by Charles de Gaulle, who used the colonial bases as a launching point to help expel the Vichy government from Metropolitan France. De Gaulle, together with most Frenchmen, was committed to preserving the Empire in its new form. The French Union, included in the Constitution of 1946, nominally replaced the former colonial empire, but officials in Paris remained in full control.
The colonies were given local assemblies with only limited local power and budgets. De Gaulle assembled a major conference of Free France colonies in Brazzaville, in central Africa, in January-February 1944. The survival of France depended on support from these colonies, and De Gaulle made numerous concessions. These included the end of forced labour, the end of special legal restrictions that applied to natives but not to whites, the establishment of elected territorial assemblies, representation in Paris in a new "French Federation", and the eventual representation of Sub-Saharan Africans in the French Assembly.
After World War II ended, France was immediately confronted with the beginnings of the decolonisation movement. In Algeria demonstrations in May 1945 were repressed with an estimated 20,000-45,000 Algerians killed. Unrest in Haiphong, Indochina, in November 1945 was met by a warship bombarding the city. Paul Ramadier's (SFIO) cabinet repressed the Malagasy Uprising in Madagascar in 1947.
French involvement in Algeria stretched back a century. Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj's movements marked the period between the two wars, but both sides radicalised after the Second World War. In 1945, the Sétif massacre was carried out by the French army. The Algerian War started in 1954. Atrocities characterized both sides, and the number killed became highly controversial estimates that were made for propaganda purposes.
Algeria was a three-way conflict due to the large number of "pieds-noirs" (Europeans who had settled there in the 125 years of French rule). The political crisis in France caused the collapse of the Fourth Republic, as Charles de Gaulle returned to power in 1958 and finally pulled the French soldiers and settlers out of Algeria by 1962.
Lasting more than eight years, the estimated death toll typically falls between 300,000 and 400,000 people. By 1962, the National Liberation Front was able to negotiate a peace accord with de Gaulle, the Évian Accords in which Europeans would be able to return to their native countries, remain in Algeria as foreigners or take Algerian citizenship.
French conservatives were disillusioned with the colonial experience after the disasters in Indochina and Algeria. They wanted to cut all ties to the numerous colonies in French Sub-Saharan Africa. During the war, de Gaulle had successfully based his Free France movement and the African colonies. After a visit in 1958, he made a commitment to make sub-Saharan French Africa a major component of his foreign-policy.
The French Union was replaced in the new Constitution of 1958 by the French Community. Only Guinea refused by referendum to take part in the new colonial organisation. However, the French Community dissolved itself amid the Algerian War; almost all of the other African colonies were granted independence in 1960, following local referendums. Some colonies chose instead to remain part of France, under the status of overseas départements (territories).
Critics of neocolonialism claimed that the Françafrique had replaced formal direct rule. They argued that while de Gaulle was granting independence, on one hand, he was creating new ties with the help of Jacques Foccart, his counsellor for African matters.
Robert Aldrich argues that with Algerian independence in 1962, it appeared that the Empire practically had come to an end, as the remaining colonies were quite small and lacked active nationalist movements. However, there was trouble in French Somaliland (Djibouti), which became independent in 1977. There also were complications and delays in the New Hebrides Vanuatu, which was the last to gain independence in 1980.
Unlike other European nations during the 1950s and 1960s, the Portuguese Estado Novo regime did not withdraw from its African colonies. During the 1960s, various armed independence movements became active in Portuguese Africa. The Portuguese Colonial War, also known as the Angolan, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambican War of Independence, was a 13-year-long conflict fought between Portugal's military and the emerging nationalist movements in Portugal's African colonies between 1961 and 1974.
The Colony of Liberia, later the Commonwealth of Liberia, was a private colony of the American Colonization Society (ACS) beginning in 1822.
Colonialism in the colonial era, mostly refers to Western European countries' colonisation of lands in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The main European countries active in this form of colonization included Spain, Portugal, France, the Tsardom of Russia (later Russian Empire and Soviet Union), the Kingdom of England (later Great Britain), the Netherlands, Belgium and the Kingdom of Prussia (now mostly Germany), and, beginning in the 18th century, the United States. Most of these countries had a period of almost complete dominance of world trade at some stage in the period from roughly 1500 to 1900.
Colonisation may be used as a method of absorbing and assimilating foreign people into the culture of the imperial country.
Many African independence movements took place in the 20th century, when a wave of struggles for independence in European-ruled African territories were witnessed. World War II (1939-1945) served as the catalyst for many of these movements, as it devastated both the colonial empires and their African territories.
After WW2, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill introduced the Atlantic Charter, which declared that the United States and Britain would "respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live." The United Nations was also formed, and colonial powers were required to make annual reports on their territories, and it gave Africans a voice to list their grievances.
French colonization of Algeria began on 14 June 1830, when French soldiers arrived in a coastal town, Sidi Ferruch. The troops did not encounter significant resistance, and within 3 weeks, the occupation was officially declared on 5 July 1830. After a year of occupation over 3,000 Europeans (mostly French) had arrived ready to start businesses and claim land. In reaction to the French occupation, Amir Abd Al-Qadir was elected leader of the resistance movement.
As World War I began, officials discussed drafting young Algerians into the army to fight for the French, but there was some opposition. European settlers were worried that if Algerians served in the army, then those same Algerians would want rewards for their service and claim political rights (Alghailani). Despite the opposition, the French government drafted young Algerians into the French army for World War I.
Since many Algerians had fought as French soldiers during World War I, just as the European settlers had suspected, Muslim Algerians wanted political rights after serving in the war. Muslim Algerians felt it was all the more unfair that their votes were not equal to the other Algerians (the settler population) especially after 1947 when the Algerian Assembly was created. This assembly was composed of 120 members.
The fight for independence, or the Algerian war, began with a massacre that occurred on 8 May 1945 in Setif, Algeria. This is a quote of three women who participated in the war: "We had visited the site and noted several possible targets. We had been told to place two bombs, but we were three, and at the last moment, since it was possible, we decided to plant three bombs.
Algeria gained independence on 20 February 1962 when the French government signed a peace accord. Peace in the country did not last long. Shortly after gaining independence, the Algerian Civil War began. The civil war erupted from anger regarding one party rule and ever increasing unemployment rates in Algeria.
Portugal built a five-century global empire, starting overseas expansion in the 15th century. Innovations such as the caravel, better navigation tools, and the school at Sagres under Prince Henry the Navigator gave the small Atlantic nation an early lead. Explorers reached islands like Madeira and the Azores, pushed down the African coasts, and arrived in Asia, including Japan, by the 16th century. Portugal established forts and colonies across Africa, including Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and territory around t...
The 1960s were a monumental decade for the people of the African continent, who saw the status quo of colonial rule by European powers, in place in most areas for three quarters of a century, dramatically disrupted. The most dramatic single year was 1960.
The CIA, a prolific publisher of maps from its inception in the 1940s, produced a series of maps titled Africa administrative divisions. This series captures the changing political status of a large number of African countries in visual format. Prior to 1959, the CIA’s Africa administrative divisions maps included a simple year in their title; beginning in 1959 and reflecting the rapid changes occurring across the continent, a month was added to the title, and multiple maps were published per year.
One country, South-West Africa, is ruled as a “Mandate” by the Union of South Africa, which itself is labeled as an independent country, along with a handful of others. The excitement of 1960 began on the very first day of the year, when Cameroon gained its independence from France.
In the map’s lower left corner, the key has grown more complex. By July 1960, just five months later, the pace of change has quickened. Five more countries are now marked “independent,” most of them from France: the Federation of Mali, Togo, and the Malagasy Republic. The center of the map is dominated by the Republic of the Congo, labeled “Belgian Congo” on the February map.
The French presence in north, west, and central Africa that was so pronounced prior to 1960 has all but vanished, save for Mauritania (“Projected independence - 1960”) and Algeria.
The last Africa administrative divisions map published in 1960 shows that the tide of independence continued its sweep across the continent through the very last month of the year (and indeed through most of the 1960s). Mauritania and Nigeria have achieved independence, and Sierra Leone is projected to join them in 1961.
Looking at one more map in the Africa administrative divisions series, dated May 1961, we can see that the pace of change has slowed: only Sierra Leone has joined the ranks of independent nations since December 1960.
